


this sky, too, is folding under you

by Nokomis



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 07:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8657479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: Nice things keep happening to Kurt. He wants to know why.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Willdew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willdew/gifts).



So, apparently Kurt is living in America now. He’s still a little hazy on how legal the situation is -- any time he brings it up, Mystique briskly says, “It’s fine,” which doesn’t precisely answer his questions, but, he’ll trust her. She did save him from the cage fights.

 

The Professor gave him his own room, even, even though most of the other students barring Jean seemed to be sharing. The room is airy and bright and the opposite of every sleeping quarter that Kurt has ever had, from the crowded and colorful clutter of the circus to the dark cells in Berlin. He has clothes purchased from the mall, and after he bought a few records a stereo appeared on his dresser. 

 

Sometimes, it all feels like a hyper-realistic dream, and he thinks perhaps he died in that box in Berlin, and this safe, accepting place is his reward.

 

*

 

The first time Scott follows him into his room, he lets out a low whistle. “Check out these digs.”

 

Kurt looked around, confused. 

 

“Your room, man,” Scott clarified. “This is amazing. I mean, I get that we’re living in a freaking mansion, but most of the dorms are pretty basic, you know? This is downright fancy.”

 

“It’s what the Professor gave me,” Kurt said quickly. “I wouldn’t ask for--”

 

“No, dude, no stress,” Scott said, holding his hands up as if to ward off Kurt’s protest. “It’s cool. Now we have a private hangout! I wonder if we could get cable up here.”

 

A week later, Kurt returned from class to find a color tv complete with cable set up in the area that had been arranged like a sitting area. 

 

He stares at it for a long time, flipping through the channels and adjusting the dials, and it continues to exist, miraculously sitting there in his room with zero explanation. Life at Xavier’s School is weird, but Kurt accepts it as it is.

 

*

 

The Danger Room was one of Kurt’s very favorite parts about living at school. Classes were fine, the friendships even better, but training with the team was the closest to pure joy Kurt has felt since he worked with the circus. 

 

It was surprising, actually, how much overlap there was between circus acts and powers-training. Kurt really enjoyed getting to fly through the air, teleporting mid-jump from one point to another. 

 

The only downside to training was that Mystique is the team leader. Mystique-- well, she kind of made Kurt nervous. Oddly, the more time he spent with her, the more the sense of unease grew. She wasn’t necessarily mean to him, it was just… The more time he spent with her, the more he realized that she didn’t quite treat him the same way that shle treated the others. 

 

She kept a bit of distance with them. As far as Kurt could tell, she was only truly close to Hank and the Professor. But she would smile and tease and sometimes even treat them as if they were friends, while with Kurt she maintained a palpable distance.

 

Kurt admired her and was grateful to her, but he was fine with letting her keep that distance. 

 

But with the rest of his teammates, he felt completely at ease. The strange gifts that appeared in his room had become sort of a running joke amongst Jean and Scott and Jubilee and even Ororo. 

 

They had begun to hang out exclusively in his room after class and practice rather than the crowded and frankly dangerous rec room, where students gathered. Any large group of teenage mutants with a shakier control of their powers than any of them would admit gathered in small areas were a recipe for disaster. Kurt thought it was fortuitous that Magneto had helped rebuild the mansion, because the steel-reinforcement in the walls were the only reason he personally thought they were still standing.

 

“Has your fairy godmother struck again?” Jean asked during training one day, sounding hopeful. She’d been bringing up the idea of a microwave in Kurt’s room lately, even though Scott had teasingly tapped his glasses and offered to heat things up for her.

 

Kurt crinkled his nose at her and said, “No.” 

 

“What?” Mystique asked. Kurt had somehow forgotten she was still standing there, her leader-face on and hands on her hips. 

 

“It’s nothing,” Kurt said, because honestly, luxuries magically appearing in his room wasn’t something to complain about, and especially not to the savior of the mutant world. 

 

“Kurt’s got the sweetest set-up of anyone here,” Scott said, because Scott was about as subtle as a pile of bricks. “It’s amazing. I mean. Have you seen his room?”

 

“No,” Mystique said, clearly annoyed. Kurt’s shoulders hunched in a bit; annoying his team leader was no way to improve his weird distance with her. They should probably drop the topic and move onto more neutral conversations. Perhaps the weather. 

 

“They are exaggerating,” Kurt said. “I did not ask for these things. But sometimes they appear, so I enjoy them.”

 

Mystique raised an eyebrow at Peter, who shrugged back at her, and then she said, “Okay, back in formation. We’re running through that one again.”

 

She didn’t bring it up again, though the rest of the team seemed to notice that her reaction had been slightly… off.

 

“It’s fine,” Kurt told Scott and Ororo after practice. “She is always this way.”

 

“It’s weird,” Ororo said. Scott nodded. “Like, she’s not exactly warm and cuddly with me, but she’s definitely got some issue with you.”

 

“Did you do something to her?” Scott asked. “Like, trip her with your tail or something?”

 

“That was just you,” Kurt said, “because you didn’t look where you were going.”

 

“Worth a guess,” Scott said. They dropped the topic, though Kurt felt somewhat vindicated that others had noticed, too.

 

*

 

The library was one of his favorite rooms in the house. It wasn’t because of the impressive collection of old, leather-bound books -- all the more impressive when he thought about how the original collection had been incinerated just a few months before, and the Professor had managed to restock an entire library in that short amount of time -- but rather for its architecture, which included exposed beams in a high-vaulted ceiling. 

 

Kurt loved the bustle of the school. He loved being surrounded by kids his age who all understood what it was to be different. He loved having friends constantly in his room. But sometimes, Kurt craved solitude in a way that was visceral. He had spent so much time alone as a child, finding empty hideaways to spend his free time in, losing himself in thought or stories or whatever had been available to him, that it had become a part of who he was. Kurt found himself more energized if he spent time alone.

 

So he had found several hidden places in the school where he could teleport himself and be left utterly alone. 

 

One of those places was the rafters of the library. He loved perching amongst them, and the soft leathery smell of the room, and the way the sunlight lit the space but left him in shadow. It was his favorite place to be.

 

So, it wasn’t that Kurt had come up here intending to eavesdrop.

 

He happened to be there when the Professor came in with Mystique.

 

He should have called out a greeting, let them know he was in there, but he heard his name and realized that they were discussing him.

 

“You shouldn’t treat Kurt any differently,” Mystique said. Her voice sounded different, somehow, and Kurt realized that she sounded younger when she talked to the Professor. Less commanding, more pleading.

 

“I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about, Raven,” the Professor replied. He sounded younger, too. More playful.

 

Someone had mentioned that Mystique had grown up here, Kurt recalled. That the Professor considered her a sister. Maybe that’s why they sounded so different together.

 

“Cut the crap, Charles,” Mystique said. “You gave him your mother’s room.”

 

“Someone had to get it,” the Professor said lightly. “And my mother’s room exploded, remember? That’s just a room that looks like my mother’s room.”

 

Kurt watched with open fascination as Mystique snorted and draped herself casually across a leather chair, legs flung over the arm of the chair. She was so different with the Professor, or perhaps it was that she was just different when she wasn’t with Kurt, and the other young members of the team.

 

The Professor didn’t look at her like she was a hero. He looked at her with a fond exasperation that marked her as family, not just a teammate. 

 

“Kurt is no different from any other student here,” Mystique said firmly.

 

“But Raven, how can you expect us to ignore--”

 

Mystique cut him off. “Charles, I don’t want to talk about what you think you know. I refuse to talk about it. And don’t go rooting around in my head, either.”

 

The Professor sighed. “Raven, there’s nothing to be ashamed--”

 

“Again, Charles, you need to stop right there.” Mystique’s voice was shaking. Her blonde hair leaked away until she was her natural shade, until she was gloriously blue, and her anger was writ on every line of her body.

 

She looked as angry as she had that day she’d rescued him in Berlin, and Kurt didn’t understand why. Their conversation had taken a sudden turn at some vital bit of information that Kurt simply did not have.

 

“Very well,” the Professor said. He looked sad, as though Mystique were on the opposite side of a vast body of water that he could not cross. 

 

Kurt wrapped his tail more firmly around the beam he was perched on. He shouldn’t have eavesdropped; his head was now spinning from trying to figure out why Mystique would get so upset about--- not Kurt himself, precisely, but something the Professor had hinted at.

 

But it was definitely related to him. 

 

The Professor turned his wheelchair and moved towards the library door, and Kurt thought that, for just a split second, that he glanced up towards Kurt’s hiding spot in the corner. Mystique left just a few minutes after the Professor did, and she never looked up.

 

*

 

The next day, a Walkman appeared on Kurt’s dresser while he was at class, along with an entire shoe box filled to the brim with cassettes, ranging from Michael Jackson to Bowie. 

 

Kurt looked at it longingly, but left it sitting there, unlistened to, out of an obscure sense of guilt. He knew now that it was the Professor leaving these things, and Kurt…

 

Kurt hasn’t done anything to earn them. Kurt didn’t know why he was doing it. 

 

He really wanted to listen to those headphones, though. Once Peter allowed him to listen to his Walkman, and it had been like living inside a music video. 

 

Kurt quickly teleported into the hall before he can give into temptation, and nearly knocked Mystique over.

 

“I am sorry!” he cried, reaching out to steady her, arms on hers and his tail wrapping around to support her back.

 

Mystique stiffened, and then pulled herself away. “Thank you.”

 

Kurt freely admitted that he struggled sometimes with English and its infinitely frustrating nuances, but this was blatant. Mystique was upset with him, more so than would be justified by simply being startled. His shoulders dropped, just a bit, because he just wants her to like him and instead, things between them were becoming odder by every interaction. 

 

Mystique’s pinched expression dropped away, and there was nothing but concern on her face when she said, “Kurt? Are you okay?”

 

“I am fine,” he said, and teleported away.

 

*

The tapes, oddly, were not new. Everything else so far had been, but there was no plastic covering, and more tellingly, he could see that each one has been played to a different spot. And at the bottom of the box was a mixtape, labelled in careful handwriting, ‘sorry.’

 

Every song was about regret and pleas for forgiveness.

 

Kurt listened to it once, and then put the walkman away in an empty drawer. His initial instinct had been right; he should have left the Walkman be. Now he felt more unsettled than ever. 

 

*

 

At the next training session, Mystique was--- well, Kurt wouldn’t precisely call it easy on him, but she’s definitely not her normal winning self. 

 

She doesn’t even get upset with him when he drops Jean after teleporting and had to frantically teleport down to catch her before she hit the ground. The incident was met with a ‘Good save,” which… Mystique has never been particularly warm towards him, and it’s almost too much, given everything he’d overheard.

 

Why had she brought him here, and why had she kept her distance once she had?

 

And why was the Professor so involved, to the point of showing favoritism towards Kurt? 

 

Kurt was just so confused. So very confused. This level of confusion went far beyond being thrust into American teenage culture and also fighting international threats all in the same week. This was a deep, unsettled confusion because he’s beginning to feel like everyone knew something about him that he didn’t.

 

After practice, Kurt teleported to the hallway outside Professor Xavier’s office. He knocked hesitantly on the door.

 

“Come in,” said the Professor almost immediately, and Kurt reluctantly took the door handle. He’d hoped the Professor would be out, or busy, but apparently not.

 

He opened the door and slowly stepped inside. “Hi,” he said, hoping his bright tones would hide his nervousness.

 

“Kurt,” the Professor said, warmly. “How are you finding your accommodations?”

 

“Fancy,” he answered honestly. 

 

His tail twitched when the Professor laughed, even though it’s not the slightest bit mocking. “I admit, I did put you in a room that I hadn’t intended for student use.”

“Why?” Kurt waited for the answer with as much patience as he could muster.

 

The Professor steepled his fingers together, then rubbed at his bald head self-consciously, and then, finally, spoke. “As an act of unasked-for kindness.”

 

Kurt waited patiently for the Professor to explain that extremely opaque answer. 

 

The Professor sighed. “I am aware that you overheard a conversation I had with my sister.”

 

Of course he’d noticed. He was psychic. “I did,” Kurt admitted cautiously. “I… It’s why I came here. Some things confused me.”

 

“No doubt,” the Professor said. “This is really a conversation you should be having with your--- with your team leader. Raven. Who is your team leader. That’s all.”

 

The Professor clamped his mouth shut at that point. Kurt eyed him. “I don’t think she’d be happy to know I listened to your conversation,” he pointed out.

 

“Is she ever happy?” the Professor pointed out.

 

Kurt thought that was a bit unfair, but he couldn’t deny that the Professor raised a valid point.

 

*

 

Finding Mystique raised its own set of challenges. Kurt quickly realized that he had no earthly idea what she did when she wasn’t being the team leader.

 

She didn’t teach classes -- Jean had told him once that the Professor had asked her to, but Mystique had turned it down, because she was uncomfortable with the way the students looked at her.

 

Kurt’s initial confusion -- “But she can look however she likes!” -- had given way to understanding when Jean had explained it was rooted in the hero-worship, not her color. Kurt had once been the Amazing Nightcrawler, after all. He could still remember the cheers and cries of delight from the audience as he’d done his tricks high above the crowds, and the way that had filled him with joy. He could also remember how the joy had turned sour when he’d heard some of what the crowds were actually saying.

 

After unsuccessfully searching the mansion, Kurt popped up next to Jean, who was sitting next to her favorite tree, attempting to do homework while Peter regaled her with a story about beating Pac-Man. At least, Kurt was pretty sure that’s what his story was about. He struggled to understand Peter a lot of the time, since his words tended to blur together to the point of being incomprehensible.

“Can you find Mystique for me?” he asks.

 

Peter perks up. “Is there a mission? Do we get to kick some bad guy butt?”

 

“No,” Kurt said. Peter’s face dropped, and Kurt repressed the odd urge to reassure him, despite the fact that Peter was a decade older. 

 

“She’s probably in the lab with Hank,” Jean said after a moment. “I could check, if you’d like, but she tends to be a little more sensitive to mental probes.”

 

She pulled a face that clearly meant that she’d been caught out before and the fallout had not been pleasant.

 

“I will check there,” Kurt said. He started to teleport away, but Jean’s hand on his arm stopped him.

 

“Kurt--- know that people have reasons for doing things, and not saying things, and it’s not… It’s not personal, okay?” Jean’s expression was guarded.

“You know the big secret,” Kurt said, accusingly. “Can you tell me?”

 

Jean shook her head. “It’s not… I would, but it’s really not my place. Just have patience with her. Some things… They grow, the longer they’re kept secret, and it becomes even harder to get the words out.”

 

“Ain’t that the truth,” Peter muttered. 

 

Kurt nodded, and teleported to Hank’s lab.

 

He’d technically been banned from doing so, after one day when he’d accidentally bumped his tail against a beaker shortly after arriving, and its contents had eaten all the way through the table. But today he managed to land in a clear spot without disturbing anything, except for Hank and Mystique.

 

“That never gets less startling,” Hank said, wiping his glasses off.

 

“What are you doing here?” Mystique asked with a surprising amount of low-level hostility. Hank looked at her, surprised, and Kurt figured that she didn’t normally talk to students that way.

 

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said in a rush, realizing only after he was done speaking that he’d nervously slipped back into German.

 

“Yeah, well, lesson time’s over, catch me tomorrow,” Mystique said guardedly. Hank looked between them, something like pity on his face.

 

“Not about the team,” Kurt said, though he wanted to just teleport away. “I want to know… I want to know why you don’t treat me like everyone else.”

That was only the tip of the iceberg of things that Kurt wanted to know about Mystique, but it was a good start. 

 

Hank looked at Mystique, and said, “I think I need to check on some things in the… in the other room. Over there. Where I’m away from this conversation.”

 

He hurried off, and Kurt was left alone with her. Mystique looked as though she wished that she could teleport away, but she held her ground. Kurt waited, searching her face, which today was as blue as his.

 

“I haven’t been treating you differently,” Mystique attempted. At Kurt’s incredulous stare, she amended herself. “I’ve been trying not to treat you differently. But I guess I’ve been failing at that.”

 

“I overheard you and the Professor talking the other day,” Kurt said. “It sounded like… Like you…” He didn’t know how to put it in words, all the strange suspicions that had been growing by the day and curling through him.

 

“Jesus,” Mystique said, looking heavenward. Kurt felt like doing the same, though his instinct was more towards prayer rather than cursing. “I wasn’t expecting to have to do this today.”

 

“Do what?” Kurt said. He thought that if he let off her for a minute, if he let the conversation slide, that she would slip away without telling him. 

 

She took a deep breath, and she said, “I didn’t find you in Berlin by accident, okay?”

 

Kurt blinked. “Okay.”

 

“It was… I saw your picture on one of those damn circus signs, and I knew… I knew it had to be you, and I went to… to make sure you were doing okay, and they’d sold you. They’d sold you, and I had to fix it.” Mystique was looking at the table, rather than at Kurt.

 

Kurt edged forward, and he said, carefully, “You knew me. How?”

 

“Isn’t it obvious?” Mystique glanced up at him. “I mean, really, you look more like your father, but you can’t deny you got my coloring.”

 

There was a moment on the trapeze when you let go, and your stomach dropped out as gravity took hold and you flew, hoping that the next swing would be in the correct place. This was the first time Kurt had felt that particular feeling while standing on solid ground.

 

“Oh,” was the only thing he could say. 

 

Mystique was looking directly at him, and her expression was somewhere between hope and fear. 

 

Kurt’s mind went completely and utterly blank, and the only thing he could think was that Mystique was his mother. Mystique. Who---

 

Who was blue, just like he was, and who had sought him out and rescued him and had tried to send him to safety. Who had been treating him differently from all the other students, from the rest of the team, but because… 

 

Was it guilt, or something else?

 

He could ask. He could ask right now, and she just might tell him. Kurt opened his mouth, and all that came out was, in German, “You are my mother?”

 

Mystique nodded.

 

All his life Kurt had wanted to know who his parents were. What his mother had been like. He’d always assumed that he’d been abandoned because of his appearance, but clearly… clearly that wasn’t the case.

 

A thousand questions bubbled within him, and Kurt didn’t have the heart to ask any of them, because he feared the answer.

 

He teleported to his room, catching sight of Mystique’s fallen expression just as he disappeared.

 

*

 

Kurt paced in his bedroom, tail flicking with frustration as he made a circuit around the room. 

 

He’d locked the door and closed the drapes so he could feel like he was fully isolated, even though he knew that with at least two telepaths in the house, his turmoil was no doubt being broadcast through the school.

 

He looked around his room, and saw it with fresh eyes. The Professor’s mother’s room-- bigger than anyone else’s, and filled with items purchased by the Professor. Who was Mystique’s brother.

 

Kurt wished, desperately, that the Professor had just told him. Instead, he’d been so gobsmacked by the news that he’d left Mystique just standing there. Which, granted, was fair, given she’d just left him laying there when he was a baby.

 

Kurt sighed and draped himself over his favorite chair. Mystique was his mother and now he knew it and she knew he knew and Kurt had no idea what he should say the next time he saw her.

 

His eyes landed on the drawer where he had stuffed the Walkman, and he remembered the mixtape that had been left in his room. He retrieved the Walkman, put on his headphones and turned it on.

 

Halfway through, he realized who had left it.

 

A soft knock on his door had him jerking off the headphones and dropping the Walkman in the chair. Kurt went to the door, taking a deep breath before opening it. 

 

It was Professor Xavier.

 

“May I come in?”

 

Kurt nodded and opened the door wider, inviting Professor Xavier into his room.

 

“Forgive me, but I sensed that perhaps your conversation didn’t go as desired,” Professor Xavier said. He didn’t look disappointed in Kurt, thankfully.

 

“Mystique is my mother,” Kurt said, because that was an incredibly important fact that he needed to keep repeating, because maybe that would make it more real.

 

“If it makes you feel better,” Professor Xavier said reassuringly, “Raven has never spoken of it to me, nor to anyone else, to my knowledge. You’re the first she’s spoken of it to.”

 

Kurt blinked. “But… you already knew.”

 

The Professor tapped the side of his bald head. “I try to stay out of the thoughts of my loved ones, especially, but some thoughts are broadcast too loudly to ignore.”

 

Kurt apparently had more than his coloring in common with Mystique, judging by the Professor’s presence. “She’s angry I’m at the school.”

 

Professor Xavier looked taken aback. “Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve never known Raven to care so deeply about anyone’s opinion of her.”

 

Kurt took a moment to absorb that thought, and it settled easily into his experiences with Mystique. She was hard on him, but… She’d left him a mixtape. And she’d confessed her relationship to him. 

 

And he’d fled. 

 

“This is why you’ve been treating me like this,” Kurt said, grasping onto something solid. He gestured around the room. “Though we aren’t… I mean…”

 

They were strangers, practically.

 

The Professor nodded. “Raven is my sister, in everything but blood. And while your connection to her so far is solely blood, I still have come to think of you as family.” He paused, as if debating the wisdom of his next words, but he went ahead. “You remind me of her, when we were children. She was never truly carefree, but I suspect you have never been, either. You both are good at not allowing that to dim your light.”

 

Kurt had known he was without family the moment he’d woken in that crate in Berlin, the circus life just a fading memory. And now he’d had not one but two people, people who were mutants like he was, claim him as family in the same afternoon.

 

“Thank you,” he managed. 

 

The Professor -- his uncle, Kurt realized -- smiled. “You’ll find the words to establish a relationship with her. For now, my advice is to simply spend time with her, even if you don’t talk about the elephant in the room, so to speak.”

 

Kurt nodded.

 

“Besides,” the Professor added, “now I get to add you to the will, since she’s properly acknowledged her relationship to you.”

 

Kurt wasn’t sure whether or not the Professor was joking. 

 

*

 

Mystique often ate dinner alone, avoiding the crowds of the dining hall. Kurt piled his own plate high, and carried it carefully to the breakfast nook where he knew she dined.

 

“Kurt,” she said, looking startled when he approached. 

 

“I would like to eat with you,” he told her. He carefully set his plate across from her. “I did not tell you, earlier, that I wanted to thank you.”

 

Mystique took a careful bite of her food and took her time chewing. Kurt pretended not to notice the way her eyes gleamed. “Please, the last thing I want is for you to thank me.”

 

Kurt shook his head. “You told me. That’s what matters. I hope, one day, that you are willing to tell me the circumstances that lead to,” he waved a hand expansively, “everything, but for now… I am happy. And would like to know you better.”

 

The smile on Mystique’s face was breathtaking. “I’d like to know you better, too.”

 

Kurt smiled back, and settled into eating. He might want to know a thousand things, ranging from why she had left him to the identity of his father, but he’d reflected on Jean’s words, and knew that he had to allow Mystique time. So instead he sat across from his mother and asked her about the weather. He thought about asking if the Professor had been joking about the will thing, but thought better of it.

 

Instead, Kurt waited until she was taking a drink before he added, “And thank you for the mixtape.”


End file.
